


Proffer my love to the posterity of the desert

by lesyeuxverts



Category: Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, M/M, Oxford, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 08:00:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21840103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesyeuxverts/pseuds/lesyeuxverts
Summary: "If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spentIf the unheard, unspokenWord is unspoken, unheard"
Relationships: Sebastian Flyte/Charles Ryder
Comments: 3
Kudos: 18
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Proffer my love to the posterity of the desert

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Skeiler](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skeiler/gifts).



> Dear Skeiler, I hope that this makes you happy! Have a fantastic Yuletide!
> 
> The poet quoted is, of course, T.S. Eliot; the summary and title are his as well.

Sebastian looked up - prettily, it must be said, even with his mouth still wet with his own sick -- and lisped "Hello," his eyes meeting mine for the first time. A sudden sharp pain hit me at hearing that word, and broke through the fog of claret and a quiet night of convivial companionship in my rooms. I knew that pain. I had felt it before, and it twisted itself in my words when I asked Sebastian why he couldn't damn well be sick somewhere else.

One of Sebastian's friends told me that to understand all is to forgive all, but I felt it hard to forgive that twist of a feeling that felt a little like hope.

One of my earliest memories of my mother was of the way she spent quiet evenings at home worrying the thick bangles she wore over her left wrist. The bangles always clanked musically when she moved gracefully -- but when she spent hours sitting in the shifting shadows cast by the fire, ostensibly occupied with a piece of needlework or the latest novel, she fidgeted and toyed with the metal bands. I never knew for certain, but I thought that the dark-inked words hidden by those silver bands were not my father's first words to her when they met. She hid her words, and never spoke of them to me -- neither did my father ever mention his. As for me, I wore a thick leather cuff around my own wrist, thicker than it needed to be to hide the short word written there.

No matter the twist of pain I'd felt at Sebastian's first word to me, that first word that carried with it echoes of a thousand greetings, first meetings, every stranger that I'd met since I was old enough to understand -- and no matter the rudeness of my first words to him, I went the next day to his rooms at his invitation. He sent a note and an embarrassment of flowers, and I went to meet him with that faint painful twinge of hope still throbbing through my breast. I had by that time suffered a thousand disappointments, strangers who had not carried my first words on their skin.

Thinking back on it, there were sweet memories there too, layered over that first twist of pain and hope -- memories of eating plover eggs with Sebastian while we waited for the rest of his guests to arrive, the shadows that the linden tree cast over his face when he paused to ask if a butterfly was more like a sonnet or a saucy limerick, the clear tones of his voice mingling with the bells that rang out over the city. That winter, we spent evenings around the fireplace in Sebastian's rooms, eating dense, sticky ginger cake and drinking hot spiced wine while we worked on our essays. Ink blotches and crumpled scraps of drawings or diatribes, stacks of books overseen by Aloysius's solemn gaze ... I seem to remember every one of those evenings, as if they were etched indelibly into the song of those Arcadian days.

We still worked in those days, Sebastian and I -- well, we worked on and off -- mostly when the claims and complaints of our tutors could no longer be ignored. I suppose I turned in half of my work late and the other half not at all, but the dreams I had known before I came to Oxford, the society of Collins and the coterie of college intellectuals so familiar to my previous life, all seemed dull and hollow. "And voices are, In the wind's singing, More distant and more solemn, Than a fading star" -- or so the poet wrote.

Jasper would have encouraged me to ignore that distant voice, but I had long since cast off the bulk of the advice he had given me at the beginning of term. I had kept my rooms, waiting for the gilly flowers to bloom again -- I gave sherry to my friends when they dropped in before lectures -- I cultivated friends that he would have called unsuitable. I paid no heed to his encomiums on the subject of suitable dress, but one thing I kept: the thick leather band around my soul-wrist. We all wore them, in those days, students and professors and townsfolk alike.

"Something plain and unremarkable," my cousin Jasper had said. "It's only seemly. You wouldn't want to draw attention to it or flaunt the fact that you're not looking for your soulmate -- or, heaven forbid, wear it bare to show the world that you are. No, there's something terribly gauche in having a soul mark. Don't let anyone get a glimpse of yours or even mention it. Anyone who hasn't got one wears a band to hide that fact, too."

Jasper was right about that at least -- we all wore bands around our wrists, all of the students who were up at Oxford, though some with more flair than others. My style of a plain unadorned band, easily slipped under sub-fusc, was the most common. Sebastian, of course, flaunted his: he had a different band for every day of the week, worn flamboyantly over academic or evening dress alike. He even dressed Aloysius to match. Herringbone, pinstripe, or braided velvet bands the blue hue of a dusk-touched sky -- the two of them set their own fashions.

Yes, Aloysius wore a band around his wrist -- always, no matter the weather and regardless of the company. A drunken undergraduate, a disgraced Wykehamist if the college rumours about him were correct, had once tasked Sebastian with it and, while under the waxing influence of a bowl of hot rum punch, had declaimed to the room at large that the idea of a bear with a soul mate was simply absurd.

Sebastian simply went out of the room, taking Aloysius, and when he came back, Aloysius was not with him. "He shan't stay here for you to hurt his feelings," was all he said. That was the last I ever heard him say on the subject

"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement's," Antony Blanche proclaimed, and we were too polite to tell him that his verses were rather lacklustre imitations, and forgettable. All of the poems that we read in those days, sitting in ragged circles around a bottle or two of port, were effervescent -- and most of Antony's were forgotten as soon as the port had been passed around again to him.

Jasper might have remonstrated with me over my choice of friends, but I had found that I rather liked the company Sebastian kept, my unsuitable new friends. I liked the way that they could switch from that awkward silence that hung over the room after Sebastian left, to Antony Blanche declaiming a few stanzas of his latest, greatest poem with sweet aplomb. All of Oxford talked about Sebastian -- gossiped about him, even -- but even the most rabid gossip-mongers left the subject of his soulmate alone.

It was as though there was an invisible wall held tight around Sebastian, more of a barrier than any band could be -- and though we shared everything in those days, that was one part of Sebastian that he did not share with me, one topic that I could never bring myself to mention to him. We came near the subject only once, after a raucous debate down at the union. Brierly had argued for the dissolution of the soul after discorporation, and had concluded that this, more than any scriptural evidence, disproved the whole notion of "so-called soulmates."

I mentioned it then, to Sebastian, as we were walking back to his rooms from the union as the dusk drew in over the city. We paused by the river and watched the swans drift along with the current, and I mentioned it then: I told him that I thought that Brierly's opponent had had the more convincing case.

"Oh, Charles," he said to me then, bending down near the river to pluck a few short blades of grass. He twisted them between his fingers and then paused, looking down at them cross-eyed while he tried to tie them into knots. "You surely don't believe in soulmates, do you?"

I touched the leather band that covered the word written on my left wrist, and I stood there watching him, watching the eddies of night air try to pluck the blades of grass from his fingers. Later, I would think about that moment when Cara told me that the English do not know what to do with love that does not come with a corresponding mark on the skin, sure and certain words. Later, I would look for words in the desert, for any words at all in the long awful silence that hung between us like an unindicted murderer.

Later, I would find some comfort in the words of the poet: "Where shall the word be found, where will the word Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence, Not on the sea or on the islands, not On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land."

But I had not yet learnt those words, and I had not yet learnt to live with the dry fluttering of a future hope, transitory and fragile and somehow already broken. I did not know what to say to Sebastian -- if the words that were in my heart were echoed by his, if the words that were on his wrist were those terrible first words that I had said to him, the first time we met. I did not know what to say, and at length, after I had been silent for a long time, he looked up at me and he smiled, and we went on walking back to his rooms.


End file.
